If I'm an NFL general manager and I need a quarterback, I'm rolling the dice and taking the big risk in search of the big reward Thursday night. I'm picking the most electric, unorthodox, exciting and unconventional player on the entire draft board.

Call me crazy, but I've seen this movie before, and it looks to me like Johnny Manziel is Kenny Stabler Jr.

That's a compliment, in case you're too young to remember the Alabama quarterback who won more regular-season games as an NFL starter than Bart Starr or Joe Namath - threw for more yards and touchdowns and a higher percentage, too - and in the quarterback business, compliments don't go much higher.

If you never saw Stabler play, even just as a kid watching on TV, you missed something special and something different. The lefty from Foley, Alabama could run and he could throw and he could drop it underneath and he could heave it deep and he could lead and others would follow because, most of all, he could win.

He won 96 times in 146 regular-season starts and seven times in 12 postseason starts, up to and including the 1977 Super Bowl, and even some of his losses were spectacular.

Everyone of a certain age remembers the Immaculate Reception by Franco Harris that gave Pittsburgh a miraculous 1972 playoff win over Oakland. Guess who came off the bench to scramble 30 yards for the go-ahead TD that set up that scenario? Stabler.

Now it's true that he also knew how to have fun away from the field, and heaven help the Snake if he'd played in the age of Twitter.

Imagine the draft profile/hatchet job Nolan Nawrocki would do on Stabler. The Internet didn't exist back then and still Stabler was only the fourth quarterback taken in the 1968 NFL draft. He went to Oakland in the second round as the 52nd overall pick, and trust me, you wouldn't recognize the three QBs chosen ahead of him.

Nawrocki did a pretty good number on Manziel for NFL.com. Here's a taste: "Has not developed a reputation as a worker or for doing the extras. Suspect intangibles -- not a leader by example or known to inspire by his words. Carries a sense of entitlement and prima-donna arrogance seeking out the bright lights of Hollywood. Is known to party too much and is drawn to all the trappings of the game."

Now read what Peter Richmond wrote about Stabler long after his retirement in "Badasses,"Richmond's 2010 book about the 1970s Oakland Raiders: "Bombing, scrapping, dinking, dunking and scrambling on the field, blond hair flapping from beneath the helmet, and, off the field, studying the playbook by the light of a jukebox, at Gene Upshaw's bar, at Al's Cactus Room, at all of the dimly lit dives where the Raiders loved to unwind. ... His unrestrained love of life off the field knew few bounds, but on the Coliseum turf, he developed into a Zen master in the huddle, always at his coolest when the situation was at its most desperate."

The same "but" that applied to Stabler works for Manziel as well. He loves life off the field, too, but when it's time to play, he's ready, willing and able to make something happen. It's not always pretty, and it'll never be considered textbook and some people will miss the player for the persona that surrounds him, but the scoreboard doesn't care what you did last night. It reflects only what you did today, and like Stabler, Manziel = gamer.

For all of his social media celebrity, Manziel's really a throwback. Something happens when he steps on the field that can't be diagrammed or taught or, in a lot of cases, defended.

In that way, he's a lot like Stabler, who should be in the NFL Hall of Fame but isn't for reasons that aren't immediately clear when you look at his record and compare it to others in there.

Stabler was a lot of things, but on the football field, he was a winner. In a lot of ways, you could say he's the spiritual father of Johnny Manziel. The team that's gutsy enough to draft Manziel on Thursday will discover, when you put all the pros and cons on the table, then clear the table and hit the field, that's a very good thing.